The benefits of a Drupal CMS

What is a Drupal CMS?

When you have a website you need a CMS (Content Management System) to amend any details, add pages or images, or delete out of date material. There’s nothing worse, is there, than finding a website that is obviously years old, with outdated references. If you want customers to have confidence in your website, and in you, then it needs to be up-to-date, attractive and easily navigable. That’s where a Drupal CMS comes in.

Drupal is a free, open source content management system that has vast numbers of enthusiastic followers and users around the world, who are willing to share ideas and expertise for the benefit of all. This has resulted in thousands of additional modules being available, so your website can be designed exactly as you want it, with the additional bonus that a Drupal CMS is very user-friendly, making it ideal for you to modify it as you introduce new lines, expand the online ordering facility, or change the images for particular promotions, to name just a few of the functions available to you.

Whilst the team at Indigoextra is very happy to maintain our clients’ websites, if they wish, we find that the majority of businesses prefer to take on the day-to-day management of the sites, once the initial web graphic design and content has been completed. We can provide sufficient information for all the everyday tasks to be carried out by you, with the comfort of having professional support and expertise if, for example, you want to introduce an interactive forum to your website, or become more adventurous with the graphics. We chose Drupal as our preferred CMS after researching a great many of the other options available and we have never regretted that decision.

Drupal 7

As with all aspects of internet technology, there are constant changes and upgrades. This is equally true for Drupal, with research currently being carried out for the Drupal 8 CMS. For now, however, Drupal 7 is the most up-to-date version available with an upgrade to Drupal 7.31 launched in August 2014.

When it was introduced in 2011, Drupal 7 continued with all the core Drupal functionality, but with greater emphasis on being even more user-friendly. The administrative functions were amended to make it easier to find and carry out all those daily maintenance tasks, whilst the improved Java script and CSS optimization catered for ever-increasing amounts of traffic with ease and speed. Since its launch in 2011, there have been over 800 additional Drupal 7 modules for different purposes, each going through a rigorous testing process before being made available to the general public as open source modules.

Search Engine Friendly Websites

For a website to appear high with search engines, it's essential that it has a range of elements, including good content and quality links to the page, however it's also essential that you can edit the Title and Description Metatag, have friendly URLs (e.g. title-of-page, rather than page-342.html), use H1 headings for the main title and H2 or H3 headings for sub-headings and have good html and CSS code.

With the right modules installed Drupal does all of this for you, leaving you free to focus on the content itself.

The Drupal CK Editor lets you easily edit text and insert photos.

Examples of Indigoextra's Drupal 7 responsive website designs.

Drupal Themes

One of the joys of using Drupal is that it is possible to enhance the overall presentation and appearance of the website by using a particular theme, such as colour, style, and combination of fonts, headers, footers, side bars or links, which is then reflected throughout your site. This can help to give a professional and unique appearance to what is, after all, your main online marketing tool.

When creating websites, we tend to adapt or create responsive Drupal themes, as these resize automatically to look good on a range of screen sizes and mobile devices.

If your business has many different facets, or perhaps is multilingual, it is possible to introduce not only the “parent” Drupal themes, but also sub-themes, which link to the parent, but have a slightly different appearance. Each page is therefore clearly recognizable as part of your company’s website – perhaps through the use of a logo or header bar – but it also has its own themed style, for instance for each language, or to divide a clothes retailer into men’s, ladies, or children’s clothes.

If you wish to make major changes to the appearance of your website, whether or not it was designed by Indigoextra originally, then it is best to contact us before introducing significant changes to themes. This is because the original web graphic design may have made use of a number of different modules in the construction of the website, so we can check for you that you won’t have any unexpected knock-on effects from changes you wish to implement.

With this proviso, enjoy the control and flexibility you have when you use your Drupal CMS.